Mobile App Development
Data Anytime Anywhere
Systems Integration
Midwest Packaging Operation
Subtitle: How a custom tablet app gave a packaging company complete visibility into profitability, one order at a time
The Client
Our client is a 100 to 150 person packaging operation that sources components from various manufacturers and packages them for distribution. With dozens of different parts moving through the facility every day, knowing which products are actually profitable isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s central to running the business well.
How We Got Involved
This project didn’t start with a conversation about time studies or profitability. RMR was originally brought in to fix a custom software solution that another firm had built and that wasn’t working correctly. Once we sorted that out, the owner had a clearer picture of what RMR could do, and came back to us with a problem he’d been sitting on for a while.
The Problem
The business was profitable. But the owner had a question he couldn’t answer with any confidence: were all of their products equally profitable, or were some items quietly losing money while the rest carried the load?
The root of the problem was labor time. How long it takes to package a given part varies quite a bit across a product line, and that time is a significant driver of cost. Without a reliable way to capture actual packaging time at the order level, any profitability number was really just an educated guess.
No off-the-shelf software tracked time at that level of detail for a packaging operation. The data wasn’t being collected, which meant the question couldn’t be answered.
What We Built
RMR designed and built a tablet application that lives on the production floor and captures time study data as work happens.
The workflow is simple by design. A packager logs in, identifies the order they’re working on, and starts a timer. When they finish, they stop it. That simplicity was intentional. The app needed to fit into the production flow without creating extra work or confusion for the people using it every day.
Behind that basic interface, the app handles quite a bit more. It clocks employees in and out, gives supervisors a live view of production activity, tracks individual employee performance, and monitors inventory. Management went from having no real-time visibility into floor operations to having a dashboard that reflects what’s actually happening.
In active production the app collects around 500 time studies per day, feeding directly into profitability analysis and giving ownership a clear picture of which products are worth packaging at current pricing and which ones need another look.
The Result
Since going live in 2020, the app has recorded over half a million time studies, giving the company one of the richest operational datasets it has ever had.
What started as an unanswered question is now a continuously updated, data-driven view of the business. Ownership can price with confidence, go into supplier negotiations with real numbers, and make decisions about their product mix based on what the data actually shows rather than what feels right.
The app runs in daily production and remains a core part of how the business operates.
Ready to talk about a problem your current software can’t solve? Get a free consultation.
Predictive Maintenance Services
Subtitle: How a rebuilt web and mobile platform gave fleet operators real-time engine health data and gave Predictive Maintenance Services a business they could scale.
The Client
Predictive Maintenance Services provides oil and fuel sample analysis to owners and operators of fleet trucks and cars. The process works like this: customers collect samples from their vehicles, ship them to the lab, and get back detailed test results that show what’s happening inside the engine before a small problem turns into a broken-down truck on the side of the road.
The value is real. Catching a developing engine issue early means a repair that costs hundreds of dollars instead of thousands. But getting those results to thousands of customers in a way that’s fast, clear, and easy to act on requires technology that works. That’s where the previous vendor had fallen short.
How We Got Involved
Predictive Maintenance Services had already tried to solve this problem. A previous vendor built them a digital platform to manage the sample workflow, but it didn’t work as intended, and the technology it was built on had a fundamental problem: there was no way to share test results with customers through a website. The system was essentially a dead end.
They came to RMR Development to figure out what could be saved and what needed to be rebuilt. The answer was mostly the latter.
The Problem
Predictive Maintenance Services’ entire business depends on getting results to customers quickly and clearly. A fleet manager who sends in an oil sample isn’t waiting for a PDF in their inbox two days later. They want to log in, see what the data says, and know whether to pull a truck off the road or keep it running.
The old system couldn’t do any of that. The workflow from sample submission to results delivery was broken in multiple places, and the platform had no realistic path to serving the scale of customers Predictive Maintenance Services needed to reach.
What We Built
RMR rebuilt the platform from scratch as a web application with two sides: one for customers, one for the lab team.
On the customer side, fleet operators log in to register their samples. The system generates a label for each one, the sample gets shipped to the facility, and the customer can track where things stand. When results are ready, they get notified and log back in to review them through a dashboard designed for someone running a fleet, not a chemist. Graphs, visual indicators, plain-language summaries. The kind of display that tells you what to do next without requiring you to interpret raw data.
On the lab side, technicians work through the backend to record test results as samples are processed. The system handles the calculations automatically. No manual math, no spreadsheet formulas, fewer chances for errors to creep in.
The platform today serves thousands of Predictive Maintenance Services customers and handles a steady, continuous flow of samples.
Extending the Platform: The Mobile App
As the customer base grew, one friction point became obvious. Fleet operators collecting samples out in the field, at a depot, a job site, or out on a route, had to wait until they got back to a desk to log their submissions. That gap slowed things down and created room for samples to get lost or delayed in the process.
RMR moved the sample collection piece into a native mobile app. Customers can now register samples, generate labels, and kick off submissions from their phones while they’re still standing next to the vehicle. The rest of the platform, the lab workflow, the results dashboard, the notifications, stays exactly the same. The mobile app just removes the bottleneck at the front end.
The result is a workflow that runs from field collection all the way through to customer-facing results without anyone having to stop and do something manually in between.
An Ongoing Partnership
The Predictive Maintenance Services platform isn’t something RMR built and handed off. We continue to work with them as the platform evolves, incorporating newer technologies to keep the system scalable, maintainable, and built for the long term. As the customer base grows and expectations change, the platform grows with it.
That ongoing relationship also means RMR understands the business deeply enough to spot opportunities for improvement that might not be obvious from the outside. The best improvements to a platform rarely come from a list of requirements. They come from understanding how a business actually operates day to day.
What Made This Project Work
We see this pattern fairly often: a company with a genuinely good service offering that’s being held back by software that wasn’t built right the first time. The problem isn’t the business; it’s the foundation.
With Predictive Maintenance Services, the work started with understanding what they actually needed: a platform that could serve thousands of customers reliably, present data in a way non-technical users could act on, and grow as the business grew. Getting the architecture right from the start is what made every subsequent expansion, the mobile app, the ongoing improvements, relatively straightforward. And it’s what has kept the relationship going year after year.
Dealing with a system that wasn’t built right the first time, or a platform that can’t grow with your business? Let’s talk.
Acme Fresh Market
Subtitle: How a northeast Ohio grocery chain built a fully integrated online shopping platform, and pivoted to curbside and delivery when it mattered most
The Client
Acme Fresh Market operates a chain of 15+ grocery stores across northeast Ohio. Competing as a regional grocery chain means meeting customers where they are, and over the past decade that’s meant building a digital presence capable of handling the full shopping experience: online ordering, digital coupons, home delivery, and a mobile app that works as well as the website.
RMR Development has been Acme’s technology partner since 2016.
How We Got Involved
When RMR took over Acme’s website in 2016, it was running on WordPress. That had worked well enough at first, but the platform had become a ceiling. The site couldn’t handle Acme’s full product catalog, which meant customers couldn’t actually shop online the way they would in a store. For a chain trying to grow its digital presence, that was a real problem.
Acme needed something built for a grocery operation, not a general-purpose content management system that had been pushed past what it was designed to do.
Phase 1: Rebuilding the Foundation
RMR rebuilt the website from scratch, replacing WordPress with a custom platform designed specifically for how Acme operates.
The new site could list the complete product catalog for online sale, which the old one couldn’t. Populating that catalog at scale required a reliable source of product data — images, descriptions, and nutritional information for thousands of items. RMR integrated the platform with Syndigo, a product content network, which pulls that data automatically and keeps it current as products change. Without that integration, maintaining accurate product information across a catalog of that size would have been an ongoing manual burden.
From there, RMR integrated the platform with Acme’s digital coupon provider so customers could clip and apply coupons directly through the site. The platform was also connected to Acme’s point-of-sale system, which meant product information and pricing only needed to live in one place. What customers saw online matched what was actually in the stores.
To keep customers engaged and informed, RMR integrated the platform with MailChimp, giving Acme the ability to run email marketing campaigns, deliver promotional offers, and send order notifications — all connected to the same customer and order data the platform was already managing.
Phase 2: The Covid Pivot
In early 2020, every grocery retailer in the country faced the same problem at the same time: customers who couldn’t or wouldn’t shop in person needed another option, and they needed it fast. For Acme, this had to happen as quickly as possible.
RMR built the solution in that window.
On the customer side, shoppers could place orders through the website, choose substitution preferences for anything that might be out of stock, and pick a time slot for pickup or delivery.
On the store side, RMR built a mobile app for Acme’s staff. When an order came in, staff got an alert. They then used the app to work through the order in the store, moving aisle to aisle and checking items off as they collected them, with substitution notes visible for anything flagged by the customer.
Acme didn’t need a separate warehouse or a third-party fulfillment platform. Their existing staff and inventory became the fulfillment operation. RMR built the tooling that made it work.
Phase 3: The Mobile App and Expanding Sales Channels
As more customers shifted to shopping on their phones, Acme needed to be there too. RMR took an existing mobile app and extended it, integrating it fully with the Acme platform so customers could shop the full catalog, clip coupons, and place orders directly from their phones.
The app runs off the same backend as the website. Inventory, pricing, promotions, and order management all stay consistent whether a customer is on the site or the app. Acme customers can use whichever they prefer and get the same experience either way.
Around the same time, Acme expanded into Instacart as an additional sales channel, giving customers the option to order through Instacart’s platform for same-day delivery. RMR integrated Instacart directly with Acme’s database, automatically pushing current product information and pricing from Acme’s system to Instacart. What customers see on Instacart stays accurate and up to date without anyone having to manually maintain a separate product feed.
Nearly a Decade of Partnership
No single phase of this project tells the whole story. What’s more notable is that RMR has been Acme’s technology partner for nearly a decade, through a full platform rebuild, multiple integrations, a pandemic pivot, a mobile expansion, and the addition of new sales channels.
The reason that’s possible is that the early architectural decisions were sound enough to support everything that came later. When Covid hit and Acme needed to move fast, there was no lengthy discovery process or ramp-up time. We knew the platform, we knew the business, and we built what they needed.
For Acme, RMR isn’t the vendor they call when something breaks. We’re the team they talk to when they’re figuring out what’s next.
What This Project Illustrates
The Acme engagement shows what a long-term development partnership actually looks like. The starting point was a platform that could handle a real grocery operation. What grew from that starting point, over years of work, was a system that handles product data syndication, digital coupons, POS integration, customer email marketing, online ordering, curbside fulfillment, delivery, a full mobile app, and third-party sales channel integration.
An off-the-shelf platform couldn’t have handled all of that with the level of integration Acme needed. And a vendor treating each project as a one-off job couldn’t have moved as fast as RMR did when it counted.
Looking for a development partner who will still be there five years from now? Let’s have a conversation.